Monday, May 15, 2017

THE HIDDEN THREAD by Liz Trenow (Review & Giveaway)

The Hidden Thread is a breathtaking novel about the intricate craft of silk and the heartbreak of forbidden love.

When Anna Butterfield's mother dies, she's sent to live with her uncle, a silk merchant in London, to make a good match and provide for her father and sister. There, she meets Henri, a French immigrant and apprentice hoping to become a master weaver. But Henri, born into a lower class, becomes embroiled in the silk riots that break out as weavers protest for a fair wage.

New York Times bestselling author Liz Trenow weaves a luminous tale of class struggle and star-crossed love.

MY THOUGHTS

I found the approach of the book to be compelling and comprehensive: the narrative scope of the book transcends the romantic angle of a star-crossed love between two characters (Anna and Henri) born into different classes and divided by several degrees of financial resources and social power. With a lovely narrative blend of facts and fiction, Trenow ushers the readers into a broader context of class and gender prejudice loosely based on the historical setting of the 1760s Spitalfields silk riots and inspired to the real life of silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Resounding with echoes of the “social novel” made popular by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo, to name a few, Trenow’s dramatization of real characters and events is rooted in history, but like on the warp threads of Henri Vendôme’s loom, the author interweaves her own threads of colorful silk and adds the whimsical touch of her imaginative speculation.

Liz Trenow is a former BBC and newspaper journalist, now working freelance. She is also the author of The Last Telegram. Liz Trenow's family have been silk weavers for nearly three hundred years, and the company is one of only three still operating in the UK today, weaving for top-end fashion houses and royal commissions.

It is this remarkable silk heritage that has inspired many of Liz's four novels, including the most recent The Hidden Thread.

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About Me

Mother of two amazing kids, Miss A™ entertainment columnist, avid reader bordering book-fetishism. Books are my childhood friends, my stress-relief therapy, my wings to fly to faraway lands and distant times, my source of knowledge and inspiration. I simply adore them and consume them aplenty. My "book love affair" began in my early teens with the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Austen, Poe, Conrad, and James. My taste in reading was shaped by those masters and still today, when I read fiction, I appreciate the dark tones, the Gothic touches, and the psychological insight typical of those classics.